Mogherini on Mogherini

How is Mogherini doing? We grade her on everything from Iran to migration here.

When POLITICO writes a report card, we want to hear from its subject. But when that subject is the EU’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, the problem is that her world is a string of crises. There’s never a good time to pause and reflect.

And so it went on Monday, April 10 — the day of the G7 foreign ministers meeting in Lucca, Italy — when we were scheduled to talk. A morning phone call became a 12-o’clock chat, then 12:30, then finally 2:30 p.m.

Her staff was faultlessly contrite, and the first words out of Mogherini’s mouth were apologies. She doubled her promised time on the phone, launching into seemingly unguarded thoughts about the state of Syria, Turkey and Cyprus.

What was missing from her words was complication. Where others might build up complex theories and weigh out balances of power, Mogherini deconstructs. If you have to get 28 ministers to support you, put yourself in their shoes, she said: “As a minister, I wanted to be involved at an early stage — so, I do that, and not just with the big [countries].”

“Many people told me it was mission impossible” — Federica Mogherini

Following a unilateral U.S. missile strike in Syria early Friday, Mogherini chose to avoid getting entangled in an attempt to pull together a common EU position on the attack itself. Instead, she used it as an opportunity to push the G7 to distance themselves from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as part of her strategy to eventually bring the civil war to an end.

Her verdict on the effort: The G7 is acting “more energetically than it has been so far.” She’s momentarily pleased with herself.

Singing on key

Asked to rate her performance as a whole, Mogherini laughed. It was not a deep-throated, let’s-move-on sort of laugh — but it was not a giggle either. It conveys that she wishes she had time to grade herself in a world of perma-crisis and flux.

Antonio Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, with Mogherini in Brussels last week | Stephanie Lecocq/EPA

As a compromise, she graded, not herself, but the role. “When I started, many people told me it was mission impossible,” she said, before rejecting the sentiment as defeatist. “This role is a unique mix of defense, development cooperation, trade, and typical diplomacy.”

Her staff has — on occasion — complained about the hours, sometimes 16 a day, seven days a week. “Sometimes, you think you need to be three or four to do this job,” she says. “But it makes sense to have this mix of competencies and instruments.”

Though Mogherini is nominally in charge of the EU’s foreign policy, in practice her role is more of a coordinator, trying to get the bloc’s chief diplomats to sing in harmony. “I get so angry when people tell me the European Union has to work with one voice,” she said. “It’s good to have different voices as long as everyone is understandable in the chorus.”

“Overall, I am happy with the level of unity [among ministers] but less happy with the nervousness and tension inside the Union” — Mogherini

“I never take the common denominator as a starting point,” she said. “It’s all about the added value. That helps me open up a lot of common ground. There are some things you can do better together. Focus on that and it is not a compromise.”

Moving past Brexit

Finally, the self-assessment emerged. “I am satisfied with the visibility [of the work] — Iran, some of our external work on migration and the good relations we have built with parts of the world like Latin America,” she said.

“Overall, I am happy with the level of unity [among ministers] but less happy with the nervousness and tension inside the Union,” she added. “It’s not my institutional responsibility to fix this, but as a European I feel sad sometimes.”

When she talks about her efforts to provide the EU with more than just soft power, there’s pride in her voice. It took just nine months to forge a consensus on defense cooperation, she stressed. “I am also keen to develop a hard power via cooperation with NATO,” she said.

Brexit didn’t defeat the EU, she added. It now has a global strategy — her global strategy — and the European Commission’s white paper on the future of the Europe was broadly seen as a success. “We are in a better place now though and we can still improve things a lot.”